by Ben Holden
Now Alliolyle, where the sand-flower blows,
Taught three old apes to sing—
Taught three old apes to dance on their toes
And caper around in a ring.
They yelled them hoarse and they croaked them sweet,
They twirled them about and around,
To the noise of their voices they danced with their feet,
They stamped with their feet on the ground.
But down to the shore skipped Lallerie,
His parrot on his thumb,
And the twain they scotched in mockery,
While the dancers go and come.
And, alas! in the evening, rosy and still,
Light-haired Lallerie
Bitterly quarrelled with Alliolyle
By the yellow-sanded sea.
The rising moon swam sweet and large
Before their furious eyes,
And they rolled and rolled to the coral marge
Where the surf for ever cries.
Too late, too late, comes Muziomone:
Clear in the clear green sea
Alliolyle lies not alone,
But clasped with Lallerie.
He blows on his shell plaintiff notes;
Ape, parraquito, bee
Flock where a shoe on the salt wave floats,—
The shoe of Lallerie.
He fetches nightcaps, one and nine,
Grey apes he dowers three,
His house as fair as the Malmsey wine
Seems sad as cypress-tree.
Three bowls he brims with sweet honeycomb
To feast the bumble bees,
Saying, ‘O bees, be this your home,
For grief is on the seas!’
He sate him lone in a coral grot,
At the flowing in of the tide;
When ebbed the billow, there was not,
Save coral, aught beside.
So hairy apes in three white beds,
And nightcaps, one and nine,
On moonlit pillows lay three heads
Bemused with dwarfish wine.
A tomb of coral, the dirge of bee,
The grey apes’ guttural groan
For Alliolyle, for Lallerie,
For thee, O Muziomone!
(1902)
Margaret Drabble has published eighteen novels, notably A Summer Bird-Cage (1963), The Millstone (1965) and The Pure Gold Baby (2013). She has also written one volume of short stories and several works of non-fiction, including studies of Wordsworth, Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson. She edited two editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature (1985, 2000). She was appointed DBE in 2008.
★
Phosphorescence – or bioluminescence – requires a network of billions of tiny organisms to blaze trails in the water in unison: algae and plankton; just as dreams require the flicker and fire of countless neurons.
The effect of phosphorescence – swirls and shimmers of colour – is not unlike those dilatory, transcendental moments after sleep latency, as we fall asleep and the insides of our eyelids swim. People experience this state with differing frequency and facility but such hallucinations are commonplace.
I remember being a teenager giddy on an acid trip, on a moonlit English beach, marvelling at the trails that followed my arms when I waved them aloft. Time had become distended. My limbs were wands.
This whirling zoetrope effect is of course different from the shimmer of colour that pulses from phosphorescence. Yet I can still see in flashback my phantasmagorical limb chasing itself, blazing trails as bright as a sparkler’s light-doodles – or the pulses of light from bioluminescence.
Those sorts of extra-sensory hallucinations are common not just to those who have dabbled with tabs, but to anyone who has entered shallow sleep. There is no emotional response to these sightings: that part of the brain has tuned out. Furtive and fugitive, shapes dance not immediately before us but deeper afield in our semi-conscious perspective. A multifocal whirligig of constellations bursts before us.
We are all prone to such hypnagogia – these hollowed hallucinations – once we, like Lucy, open wide shut our kaleidoscope eyes.
Fireflies of the Sea
by James Fenton
Dip your hand in the water.
Watch the current shine.
See the blaze trail from your fingers,
Trail from your fingers,
Trail from mine.
There are fireflies on the island
And they cluster in one tree
And in the coral shallows
There are fireflies of the sea.
Look at the stars reflected
Now the sea is calm
And the phosphorus exploding,
Flashing like a starburst
When you stretch your arm.
When you reach down in the water
It’s like reaching up to a tree,
To a tree clustered with fireflies,
Fireflies of the sea.
Dip your hand in the water.
Watch the current shine.
See the blaze trail from your fingers,
Trail from your fingers,
Trail from mine
And as you reach down in the water,
As you turn away from me,
As you gaze down at the coral
And the fireflies of the sea.
(1987)
★
From The Princess
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.
Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.
Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.
Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.
Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.
(1847)
★
As our bodies are submerged by sleep, our shipwrecked brains drown in psychogeography.
J. G. Ballard’s stories deluge their readers with desires and dislocations. In this luminous tale, ‘Now Wakes the Sea’, sodden in subconscious and as salty as any old shanty, his protagonist, Mason – a name that incongruously conjures stone and utility, joints and joinery – proves an adventurous avatar.
Now Wakes the Sea
by J. G. Ballard
Again at night Mason heard the sounds of the approaching sea, the muffled thunder of breakers rolling up the near-by streets. Roused from his sleep, he ran out into the moonlight, where the white-framed houses stood like sepulchres among the washed concrete courts. Two hundred yards away the waves plunged and boiled, sluicing in and out across the pavement. Foam seethed through the picket fences, and the broken spray filled the air with the wine-sharp tang of brine.
Off-shore the deeper swells of the open sea rode across the roofs of the submerged houses, the white-caps cleft by isolated chimneys. Leaping back as the cold foam stung his feet, Mason glanced at the house where his wife lay sleeping. Each night the sea moved a few yards nearer, a hissing guillotine across the empty lawns.
For half an hour Mason watched the waves vault among the rooftops. The luminous surf cast a pale nimbus on the clouds racing overhead on the dark wind, and covered his hands with a waxy sheen.
At last the waves began to recede, and the deep bowl of illuminated water withdrew down the emptying streets, disgorging the lines of houses in the moonlight. Mason ran forwards across the expiring bubbles, but the sea shrank away from him, disappearing around the corners of the houses, sliding below the garage doors. He sprinted to the end of the road as a
last glow was carried across the sky beyond the spire of the church. Exhausted, Mason returned to his bed, the sound of the dying waves filling his head as he slept.
‘I saw the sea again last night,’ he told his wife at breakfast.
Quietly, Miriam said: ‘Richard, the nearest sea is a thousand miles away.’ She watched her husband for a moment, her pale fingers straying to the coil of black hair lying against her neck. ‘Go out into the drive and look. There’s no sea.’
‘Darling, I saw it.’
‘Richard— !’
Mason stood up, and with slow deliberation raised his palms. ‘Miriam, I felt the spray on my hands. The waves were breaking around my feet. I wasn’t dreaming.’
‘You must have been.’ Miriam leaned against the door, as if trying to exclude the strange nightworld of her husband. With her long raven hair framing her oval face, and the scarlet dressing-gown open to reveal her slender neck and white breast, she reminded Mason of a Pre-Raphaelite heroine in an Arthurian pose. ‘Richard, you must see Dr Clifton. It’s beginning to frighten me.’
Mason smiled, his eyes searching the distant rooftops above the trees. ‘I shouldn’t worry. What’s happening is really very simple. At night I hear the sounds of the sea, I go out and watch the waves in the moonlight, and then come back to bed.’ He paused, a flush of fatigue on his face. Tall and slimly built, Mason was still convalescing from the illness which had kept him at home for the previous six months. ‘It’s curious, though,’ he resumed, ‘the water is remarkably luminous. I should guess its salinity is well above normal—’
‘But Richard . . .’ Miriam looked around helplessly, her husband’s calmness exhausting her. ‘The sea isn’t there; it’s only in your mind. No one else can see it.’
Mason nodded, hands lost in his pockets. ‘Perhaps no one else has heard it yet.’
Leaving the breakfast-room, he went into his study. The couch on which he had slept during his illness still stood against the corner, his bookcase beside it. Mason sat down, taking a large fossil mollusc from a shelf. During the winter, when he had been confined to bed, the smooth trumpet-shaped conch, with its endless associations of ancient seas and drowned strands, had provided him with unlimited pleasure, a bottomless cornucopia of image and reverie. Cradling it reassuringly in his hands, as exquisite and ambiguous as a fragment of Greek sculpture found in a dry riverbed, he reflected that it seemed like a capsule of time, the condensation of another universe. He could almost believe that the midnight sea which haunted his sleep had been released from the shell when he had inadvertently scratched one of its helixes.
Miriam followed him into the room and briskly drew the curtains, as if aware that Mason was returning to the twilight world of his sick-bed. She took his shoulders in her hands.
‘Richard, listen. Tonight, when you hear the waves, wake me and we’ll go out together.’
Gently, Mason disengaged himself. ‘Whether you see it or not is irrelevant, Miriam. The fact is that I see it.’
Later, walking down the street, Mason reached the point where he had stood the previous night, watching the waves break and roll towards him. The sounds of placid domestic activity came from the houses he had seen submerged. The grass on the lawns was bleached by the July heat, and sprays rotated in the bright sunlight, casting rainbows in the vivid air. Undisturbed since the rainstorms in the early spring, the long summer’s dust lay between the wooden fences and water hydrants.
The street, one of a dozen suburban boulevards on the perimeter of the town, ran north-west for some three hundred yards and then joined the open square of the neighbourhood shopping centre. Mason shielded his eyes and looked out at the clock tower of the library and the church spire, identifying the protuberances which had risen from the steep swells of the open sea. All were in exactly the positions he remembered.
The road shelved slightly as it approached the shopping centre, and by a curious coincidence marked the margins of the beach which would have existed if the area had been flooded. A mile or so from the town, this shallow ridge, which formed part of the rim of a large natural basin enclosing the alluvial plain below, culminated in a small chalk outcropping. Although it was partly hidden by the intervening houses, Mason now recognized it clearly as the promontory which had reared like a citadel above the sea. The deep swells had rolled against its flanks, sending up immense plumes of spray that fell back with almost hypnotic slowness upon the receding water. At night the promontory seemed larger and more gaunt, an uneroded bastion against the sea. One evening, Mason promised himself, he would go out to the promontory and let the waves wake him as he slept on the peak.
A car moved past, the driver watching Mason curiously as he stood in the middle of the road, head raised to the air. Not wishing to appear any more eccentric than he was already considered – the solitary, abstracted husband of the beautiful but childless Mrs Mason – Mason turned into the avenue which ran along the ridge. As he approached the distant outcropping he glanced over the hedges for any signs of water-logged gardens or stranded cars. The houses had been inundated by floodwater.
The first visions of the sea had come to Mason only three weeks earlier, but he was already convinced of their absolute validity. He recognized that after its nightly withdrawal the water failed to leave any mark on the hundreds of houses it submerged, and he felt no alarm for the drowned people who were sleeping undisturbed in the sea’s immense liquid locker as he watched the luminous waves break across the roof-tops. Despite this paradox, it was his complete conviction of the sea’s reality that had made him admit to Miriam that he had woken one night to the sound of waves outside the window and gone out to find the sea rolling across the neighbourhood streets and houses. At first she had merely smiled at him, accepting this illustration of his strange private world. Then, three nights later, she had woken to the sound of him latching the door on his return, bewildered by his pumping chest and perspiring face.
From then on she spent all day looking over her shoulder through the window for any signs of the sea. What worried her as much as the vision herself was Mason’s complete calm in the face of this terrifying unconscious apocalypse.
Tired by his walk, Mason sat down on a low ornamental wall, screened from the surrounding houses by the rhododendron bushes. For a few minutes he played with the dust at his feet, stirring the white grains with a branch. Although formless and passive, the dust shared something of the same evocative qualities of the fossil mollusc, radiating a curious compacted light.
In front of him, the road curved and dipped, the incline carrying it away on to the fields below. The chalk shoulder, covered by a mantle of green turf, rose into the clear sky. A metal shack had been erected on the slope, and a small group of figures moved about the entrance of a mine-shaft, adjusting a wooden hoist. Wishing that he had brought his wife’s car, Mason watched the diminutive figures disappear one by one into the shaft.
The image of this elusive pantomime remained with him all day in the library, overlaying his memories of the dark waves rolling across the midnight streets. What sustained Mason was his conviction that others would soon also become aware of the sea.
When he went to bed that night he found Miriam sitting fully dressed in the armchair by the window, her face composed into an expression of calm determination.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
‘Waiting.’
‘For what?’
‘The sea. Don’t worry, simply ignore me and go to sleep. I don’t mind sitting here with the light out.’
‘Miriam . . .’ Wearily, Mason took one of her slender hands and tried to draw her from the chair. ‘Darling, what on earth will this achieve?’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’
Mason sat down on the foot of the bed. For some reason, not wholly concerned with the wish to protect her, he wanted to keep his wife from the sea. ‘Miriam, don’t you understand? I might not actually see it, in the literal sense. It might be . . .’ he extemporized . . . ‘an halluc
ination, or a dream.’
Miriam shook her head, hands clasped on the arms of the chair. ‘I don’t think it is. Anyway, I want to find out.’
Mason lay back on the bed. ‘I wonder whether you’re approaching this the right way—’
Miriam sat forward. ‘Richard, you’re taking it all so calmly; you accept this vision as if it were a strange headache. That’s what frightens me. If you were really terrified by this sea I wouldn’t worry, but . . .’
Half an hour later he fell asleep in the darkened room, Miriam’s slim face watching him from the shadows.
Waves murmured, outside the windows the distant swish of racing foam drew him from sleep, the muffled thunder of rollers and the sounds of deep water drummed at his ears. Mason climbed out of bed, and dressed quickly as the hiss of receding water sounded up the street. In the corner, under the light reflected from the distant foam, Miriam lay asleep in the armchair, a bar of moonlight across her throat.
His bare feet soundless on the pavement, Mason ran towards the waves. He stumbled across the glistening tideline as one of the breakers struck with a guttural roar. On his knees, Mason felt the cold brilliant water, seething with animalcula, spurt across his chest and shoulders, slacken and then withdraw, sucked like a gleaming floor into the mouth of the next breaker. His wet suit clinging to him like a drowned animal, Mason stared out across the sea. In the moonlight the white houses advanced into the water like the palazzos of a spectral Venice, mausoleums on the causeways of some island necropolis. Only the church spire was still visible. The water rode in to its high tide, a further twenty yards down the street, the spray carried almost to the Masons’ house.
Mason waited for an interval between two waves and then waded through the shallows to the avenue which wound towards the distant headland. By now the water had crossed the roadway, swilling over the dark lawns and slapping at the doorsteps.
Half a mile from the headland he heard the great surge and sigh of the deeper water. Out of breath, he leaned against a fence as the cold foam cut across his legs, pulling him with its undertow. Illuminated by the racing clouds, he saw the pale figure of a woman standing above the sea on a stone parapet at the cliff’s edge, her black robe lifting behind her in the wind, her long hair white in the moonlight. Far below her feet, the luminous waves leapt and vaulted like acrobats.
